Stuff Brits Like

by Fraser McAlpine

  So to sum up after the briefest of stone-skims across the surface of the British love affair with cars: there is a firm meeting point between motors, leering sexuality, smashing stuff up and classic rock music, and that’s the place in which you will find Top Gear.

  Top Gear has never really been about the science of cars, although it does feature a lot of technical information, delivered with the giddy glee of schoolboys who don’t seem to fully grasp the significance of the specifications they strongly trot out: it’s more of a talk show than a torque show. That’s why they bring famous people in for a chat and a drive around their racetrack. Once you get past the secret entry door that is their winking claim to be a useful consumer guide—easy to disprove just by looking at the prices of the cars they overwhelmingly tend to favour—it’s clear that the purpose of the show is to treat automobiles as a kind of Swiss Army knife with hidden tools.

  “I know what this thing is supposed to do,” the makers of the show insist. “I’m supposed to point it towards the place I wish to get to, and assuming I have enough petrol in the tank and the traffic isn’t too unforgiving, I’ll get there in the end. But this is a TV show! We need to make things more interesting. What else can we make it do? What can we race it against? Who can we put in it? What if a car was a boat? What if a car was an airplane? What if you could wear two cars as shoes? What if you could use a car to play football? Or ice hockey? Or poker? Or send one down a ski jump? Ooh! Ooh! I know! What if we could put a car into space?!”

  And then they attempt all of these ideas and many more besides, but they don’t bring in the guys from Pimp My Ride to do any of the refurbishing work properly, because (a) that would cost a lot of money and this is a BBC TV show and (b) it’s better to show the three presenters bodging their way through it as best they can, and failing. This also applies if all they are trying to do is get from A to B, where A is one side of a desert/mountain range/ocean floor and B is the other. Throw in a bloke in a white Formula 1 outfit who never takes his helmet off—all we know is, he’s called the Stig—and your formula is complete.

  The other thing Top Gear does is remove the veil of British reserve from an equally British kind of impatience. The show’s three best-known presenters—James May, Richard Hammond and especially Jeremy Clarkson—have all displayed a Mr Toad attitude towards things that obstruct their view of the open road and what should be allowed on it. Caravanners, people who drive the wrong sorts of cars, cyclists, parking attendants, speed cameras, foreigners, women . . . anything and everything that stands, rolls or officiously puts a barrier between them and putting their pedal extremity to the pedal to the metal is given short shrift. This does not always make them friends, but to a certain mind-set, it also feels a lot like cocking a snook at sensible killjoys who can’t relax enough to enjoy a spot of ribald humour—this, as you can imagine, causes quite a lot of debate—and so the aggro caused by their worst tuts and slanders is often matched and even bested by the warm glow of approval from adoring fans (see: Cocking a Snook).

  But the secret ingredient to Top Gear’s success is that it doesn’t really matter about the cars at all, because the show is about mates being mates and doing matey things together, matily. You, the audience, are one of the mates too, if you want to be. And actually it would be the same if the show were about cosmetics or DIY or if all the presenters were speed cameras dressed as foreign women in a caravan. So long as you have friends openly mocking each other while smashing up the things they claim to love the most, it’s Top Gear.

  WHAT TO SAY: “I know—what if you could use a car to get stones out of a horse’s hoof?”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Say, why do you guys drive on the wrong side of the road anyways?”

  Chocolate That Tastes of Chocolate

  Selected highlights of British chocolate.

  The Belgians and the Swiss may claim to have the best chocolate in the world, but when it comes down to everyday confectionery, the kind of sweets you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite (as the commercials for British Milky Way used to say), the Brits tend to prefer their own.

  Granted, you can get some chocolate foodstuffs that are common pretty much everywhere. M&M’s, for example, although the idea of little chocolate buttons covered in a colourful sugar shell already existed in Britain; they are called Smarties and Minstrels. Smarties are like classic M&M’s (but made with Cadbury chocolate and without any of the variants that include peanuts or peanut butter or coconut etc.) and Minstrels are bigger and coinier—although not as coinlike as the shell-less Cadbury Buttons—and have Galaxy chocolate inside. This is important, because while each brand of chocolate tastes noticeably different from the other, the one thing you can definitely say is that they both taste of chocolate.

  Or, to be strictly accurate, they sure don’t taste of the ratios of cocoa solids to sugar that British palates have grown accustomed to in a milk chocolate confectionery, given that the real taste of pure chocolate is richer, deeper and more bitter than you would find wrapped around a Snickers bar, wherever it may be from. If you’re looking for that kind of chocolate, and you’re in a supermarket, the brand to look for is Green & Black’s. Theirs is chocolate for grown-ups and they do not make anything that resembles M&M’s.

  As far as the locals are concerned, British chocolate bars are nicer, even when they would appear to be the same as their American counterparts. There are a few regional variations to consider too. A British Milky Way is just nougat and chocolate; add caramel and it’s an American Milky Way, or the British Mars bar; add peanuts and it’s the American Mars bar, and also the international Snickers (formerly known to Brits of a certain age as a Marathon). And yes, all the British versions taste nicer.

  Other creations from the Mars family include Twix (two finger biscuits with caramel on top and coated in chocolate); Topic (a hazelnut Snickers, but shorter in length and taller); Bounty (a coconut and chocolate creation that is an equivalent to the American, unpleasantly pooishly named Mounds; blue wrappers have milk chocolate, red have plain); and Maltesers, which are malted honeycomb balls in chocolate. They can also be found in a bag of Revels, which is an assortment of chocolate balls stuffed with something—a raisin! toffee! coffee! just chocolate!—best eaten by really fussy people for a Russian roulette thrill.

  Mars also makes Galaxy chocolate, which is available in bars and slabs and with various nuts and extras. Galaxy is sold as Dove chocolate around the world, but, again, the Brits remain loyal to the local version only.

  And some products are only available locally, such as the decidedly grown-up Fry’s chocolate bars, all of which are made with plain chocolate and contain soft centres with either chocolate, peppermint or orange flavouring. Fry’s also make the Turkish delight, in which some Turkish delight (rose-flavoured jelly, essentially) is dipped in chocolate. These are not everyday treats. Nor is Terry’s Chocolate Orange, a ball-shaped masterpiece of confectionery architecture; this tends to come out at Christmastime, where the ritual of banging it on a tabletop to loosen it into segments can leave unpleasant dents on your furniture.

  Rowntree was a real giant of British sweet making during a golden age of discovery and innovation (and hyperbole). Theirs was a Wonkalike kingdom where chocolate was just one of many flavours to explore. The company has been bought out by Nestlé now, and therefore is subject to fewer local quirks, but in its time Rowntree created some of the most beloved of all British confectionery.

  There are Smarties, yes, but also Tooty Frooties; Fruit Pastilles; Fruit Gums; Polos; Rolos; After Eights; Aero (with bubbles, effectively chocolate with added less!); Yorkie bars you could break your teeth on; lumpy Lion bars; twiggish and elegant Matchmakers; the solid-but-dollopy Walnut Whip; and the immortal Kit Kat.

  Nestlé also gave us the white chocolate Milky Bar, as advertised by a blond cowboy with spectacles called the Milky Bar Kid who would regularly give whole boxes of the product away, provided he had bested some six-gun-totin’ hoodlum first. A mo
st curious marketing strategy, that . . .

  But the real chocolateering slog was and is performed by the British end of the Cadbury brand. As well as simple delights such as the Dairy Milk bar (just chocolate), the Whole Nut bar (chocolate and hazelnuts) and the Fruit & Nut bar (almond and raisin), Cadbury is responsible for the Crunchie (honeycomb in chocolate); the Wispa (like an Aero only with tiny bubbles in chocolate); the Picnic (biscuit, nougat, caramel, nuts, puffed rice and raisins in chocolate); the Time Out (fingers of flaked chocolate between wafers, in chocolate); the Twirl (flaked chocolate in chocolate); the Boost (weird burrito of crushed biscuit rolled in caramel, rolled in chocolate, sometimes with added guarana); the Starbar (same but with exciting wrappers); the Chomp and the Curly Wurly (both chewy caramel in chocolate but in markedly different shapes); the Caramel (runnier caramel than a Chomp and in chocolate-covered segments); and the Freddo (frog-faced chocolate for kids).

  Cadbury has come to define the British run-up to Easter too, by allowing its Creme Eggs (yolky sugary goop in a chocolate eggshell) and Mini Eggs (like egg-shaped Smarties but with an eggshell finish) to be sold only from around Christmas to around June. This means the Brits can effectively live a binary year: it’s either Creme Egg time or mince pie time.

  The Flake is a crumbly creation that has two uses: it’s notable for being jammed into the piped ice cream cones you get from the ice cream van, a concoction known as a 99, which children particularly enjoy. However, the adverts for Flakes were always a bit “sexy girl puts something in her mouth slowly, yeah?” leaving the ice-cream-less kids to assume this was a grown-up affair and opt for something far less troubling, like a Fudge with its entirely worry-free song: “a finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat.”

  What? Who’s giggling? Stop it at once.

  WHAT TO SAY: “Haven’t Mars bars changed size? They used to be bigger.”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “I prefer crisps.”

  Stonehenge

  A moment of historical vertigo kicks in when thinking about any of the great Neolithic sites that can still be found in overlooked corners of the British Isles. Stone circles like the ones at Avebury, or the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney, and curious edifices like the gigantic picnic table of Cornwall’s Lanyon Quoit are proof that humans were active and busy and productive thousands of years before there ever was such a thing as England or Wales. And in the case of the most famous circle of all—Stonehenge—the evidence indicates that the area around Avebury in what is now Wiltshire has been occupied continuously for over ten thousand years.

  Even taking into account the astonishing evidence that suggests it spent fifteen hundred years evolving as a constructed site, Stonehenge itself is only somewhere between four thousand and five thousand years old, of which a little over one thousand have been spent in a country called England. Before that it was in a land of warring kingdoms and battling barons—and the Romans—and back beyond that is all myth and legend and not writing enough stuff down.

  And it’s the lack of scientific understanding as to what these Neolithic sites were truly for that drives a chunk of the mystery. Some stones in some circles appear to be aligned with the rising of the sun or the setting of the sun on key dates of the year. So it could be that they’re nothing but solar calendars, designed to help farmers work out what needs doing in order to secure the best harvest. And in a way this makes as much sense as the idea that they exist for ceremonial purposes, because the two things that, to this day, are likely to make a community band together in common effort are ceremony and commerce (and war, but it’s unlikely anyone would have built Stonehenge as an act of aggression, unless Neolithic humans were big on metaphors or had a system of writing that spelled out insults that look like a big stone lowercase n).

  Lanyon Quoit: You need a very impressive chair to sit at this table.

  Consequently, all manner of pagan and neo-pagan rites have been enacted among standing stone circles by neo-druids. There’s a huge celebration at Stonehenge for the summer solstice (21 June) and an equivalent one in winter (21 December) because that’s how the site is laid out, to give a dramatic effect to the rising and setting of the sun at key moments of the year. It’s clear some kind of ceremony would have been held on the site, and so antiquarians have resolved to try to imagine what kind of a thing it would have been, and then re-create it.

  This might seem a little daft, given that there’s no record of the kinds of things that might have been going on at the time, and should it turn out that any of them involved ritual sacrifice of human beings, the event may lose some of its appeal, but that’s really the point. It’s a way of putting the mind back beyond everything we know about, to a time when residents of the British Isles made their first permanent marks on the landscape.

  But it’s not all druids and incense. Popular culture is as obsessed with Stonehenge as anyone. Turner and Constable painted it, Words worth wrote about it in verse. Any retelling of the Arthurian myths will inevitably place some of the action within the stones—and maybe credit Merlin with putting them there in the first place (with the help of some giants, naturally; he’s no builder). The movie This Is Spinal Tap depicts a typically dozy English rock band attempting to create a stage spectacle called Stonehenge but failing because of a catastrophic error in scale. Doctor Who set a particularly stirring speech there, during the Roman invasion of Britain, in which the time traveller invited a galaxy-ful of aliens to come and get him while standing in the centre of the stones. This, remember, was still two thousand years after everyone who genuinely did build the place had died.

  Not to mention the designs carved into the chalk hills, the white horses and lions, all of which are much more recent than any stone circle but still an attempt to reconcile the human population with the landscape that surrounds them.

  The provocative artist Bill Drummond (formerly of the visionary postrave dance group the KLF) proposed a plan to buy the plot of land on which the Rollright Stones were situated, take all the stones and grind them into fine powder, then make that powder into cement and pour it into monolith-shaped moulds. He then wanted to return the reconstituted monoliths to their original positions to see if he could jump-start the stone circle into doing whatever it is stone circles are supposed to do.

  It’s a challenging idea, and one that fair turns the stomach over when thinking about the damage he could have inflicted upon a site that had remained untouched for so many centuries. There again, who wouldn’t like to see a fully working stone circle in action? Who knows what wonders could be achieved?

  WHAT TO SAY: “It’s a hallmark of a society that has become elevated above the day-to-day concerns of survival.”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “I bet it’s a gateway to another dimension using the old magic that no one talks about because they are scared. Or maybe they were forced to forget by evil wizards! Did you think of that?”

  Embarrassing Foreigners

  Mousehole, home of Jerry, Mickey and Mighty.

  Please do not feel that a visitor to the UK would be made to feel unwelcome; Brits love tourists, providing they are a source of revenue for the local economy, they’re part of a valuable cultural exchange between two proud nations, or they bring supplies of sweets you can’t get in your local store. At all other times, it’s total war.

  Although, being Britain, the weapons used in the field of battle tend to be less physical (see the points above, particularly the one about revenue) and more lexicographical. There are three principal ways in which the Brits enjoy snickering up their sleeves at Johnny Not-from-Round-Here, especially visitors from the U.S. of A.

  1. Mocking the way Americans spell stuff.

  2. Deliberately giving streets and villages dirty names and acting like it’s no big deal.

  3. Mocking the fact that outsiders can’t immediately pronounce British things that are not said the way they are spelled.

  The first is a hangover from the days of Noah Webster, who rewrote the American English dictionary
, taking out unnecessary letters like the u in colour and the ugh in plough (and then adding a w) and rearranging theatre so it looked less fancy. If there’s one thing guaranteed to make a chippy Brit do that superior smile that boils the blood, it’s making out that Americans don’t know how to spell words properly, and that’s because Noah Webster did such a thorough job of tidying them up.

  Of course, it’s an unwinnable argument, akin to saying that language should obey the rules of the supermarket queue: first come, best spelled. And it generates a lot of unnecessary friction, which is entirely the point. You can delve into the social psychology of the situation and say it’s a kind of consolation prize; that making such a fuss about something so trivial is a way of culturally dealing with the fact that America is America and Britain just plain isn’t (see: America), but actually they do it to everyone. And even though the split between Britain and the United States happened during a time when spellings were particularly fluid, with both countries only formally nailing their colours/colors to the mast during the 1800s, the Brits will always act as if it is their language that the Americans are spoiling with their color, their flavor, and their rigor.

  And then, just to prove there is no pomposity that cannot be undercut with some good old-fashioned toilet humour, they will send you on an errand to Beaver Close or Shitterton and act like you’re a child for giggling.

  Some British place-names are obscene in an internationally understood way: Cockermouth, Crotch Crescent, Fingringhoe, Hornyold Road, Sandy Balls, Dick Court (sadly not in a district called Zipper).

  Some of them sound rude only to Brits: Back Passage (arf!), Minge Lane (oof!), Fanny Hands Lane (because you see . . . ah, ha-ha . . . in Britain the word fanny means . . .), Twatt (precisely) and Bell End, which is a village that has double points for embarrassing foreigners. Not only is a bellend a term of abuse based on a description of the rounded tip of a penis in British slang, but also the village is in Worcestershire, which is pronounced “woostersheer.” Get that wrong and you will be lightly mocked or, worse, corrected in a helpful and earnest fashion. The shame of it!